A Climate Action Proposal: Hold the Presidential Election in August

Cliches abound regarding people who vote with their hearts, or their heads, or their guts. What about voting with their sweat glands?

This week, as hundreds of millions of Americans swelter, and some likely die, it would be hard to focus on much else than the heat. Records are falling all over the country, fires have sprung up across the West, and further heat waves are forecast. The heat, and even climate change’s role in it, are in the news, all over the place. It’s grim!

And so: If we really wanted the government to treat this as the existential issue it is, a proposal: move the presidential election to early or mid-August.

At that point, the hottest month of the year has just ended and heat waves will linger on in many places. Fires are likely raging in many areas, potentially sending smoky plumes across the entire country, and hurricanes are probably churning in the Caribbean and starting to menace the Gulf Coast or the Carolinas. It is still, in August, very hot. Let people vote in the heat!

I’ve written before how polling that asks about climate change should ideally be done at the same time of year every year, or you risk letting the background question of “is it nice outside?” dominate the actual polling questions. For example, the Yale Program on Climate Communications released its latest “Climate Change in the American Mind” report in June, based on a survey of about 1,000 people conducted April 25 to May 4. In that delightful Spring window, 52 percent of respondents said that global warming should be a high or very high priority for the president and for Congress; 62 percent of registered voters said they would rather vote for a candidate who supports action on the issue. But also: of the 28 issues the survey asked about, warming ranked 19th in respondents’ priorities. I assume many people answered these questions while sitting outside enjoying a beverage on a pleasant breezy day.

Then consider a poll from the Pew Research Center of almost 9,000 adults conducted from September 25 through October 1 of last year (caveat: I am well aware that comparing different polls and surveys from different groups using different questions and other methodology is problematic; for the purposes of this utterly impossible proposal, I simply do not care). In that survey, conducted literally in the midst of Hurricane Ian’s rampage across Florida and in very recent memory of the (then) hottest summer in more than 100,000 years, 71 percent of respondents agreed that climate change is causing a great deal of or some harm.

Even earlier Pew polling reveals the summer divide. A poll conducted from May 30 to June 4 — downright balmy! — last year found that only 54 percent of Americans consider climate change a “major threat” to the country. If you pose the far more consequential “poll” question of who should be president in the midst of the heat waves and hurricanes, some non-zero number of people will make the obvious vote for climate action.

Obviously, these poll results carry huge gaps between Democrats and Republicans. In that last Pew poll, for example, 78 percent of Democrats called climate change a major threat, compared with only 23 percent of Republicans. But the swings seen from pleasant days to hell-on-Earth days seem to carry across party lines. Monmouth polling saw the same eight percentage drop in people finding the issue to be a “very serious problem” for both parties between 2021 and 2023 — the former survey done in September, and the latter in late April.

The fact is, climate change is a massive threat to the lives, livelihoods, and overall economic and general wellbeing of the country, and of course the world. And so why should we fickle voters cast our ballots in the pleasant chill of early November? (Caveat number two: I am aware of various laws and pieces of U.S. statute that dictate specifically when elections are held, and again, for the purposes of this clearly unworkable and obviously correct idea, I again could not care any less.)

Yes, hurricanes are still technically in season then, for another few weeks, but the meteorological peak is September 10. Heat waves like those currently sweeping the country are a thing of distant memory. Hold the election in August!